The O’Malley Recession Deepens

While Governor Martin O’Malley traipses around the country running for President promoting his party’s agenda, maybe he should stop for a hot second and look at what’s going on here in his own backyard:

Maryland shed 7,500 jobs in May, as the state posted one of the largest losses in the country for the second month in a row, the U.S. Department of Labor said Friday.

Only North Carolina and Pennsylvania saw bigger cuts in May, according to the new estimates. Quirks of weather may have played a role in Maryland’s poor showing, but experts warned that the state’s economy appears to be weakening just as a potentially large pullback in federal spending threatens to bring more pain to a region flush with government contractors, agencies and research grants.

“This is unnerving, I have to tell you, because we know the decline in federal government outlays has just begun,” said Anirban Basu, a Baltimore economist. “The economic outlook, I think, is pretty grim.”

Trending: Thank You

Maryland’s unemployment rate rose to 6.8 percent, from 6.7 percent in April. The increase came even as the pool of residents working or looking for work shrank, another bad sign.

Emphasis mine…

O’Malley and the Democrats have always believed that federal largesse would spare Maryland from the deepening impacts of the recession that has been caused in no small part by their own tax and spend policies that do tremendous damage to taxpayers and create a tax and regulatory climate that makes it more and more difficult each day for businesses to create sustainable job growth. It was over four years ago when I first documented the liberal myth of the recession-proof economy, and they still believe to this day that we can tax and spend our way to prosperity here in Maryland.

And folks it’s not getting any better. The article notes that Northrop Grumman has seen an 11% reduction in jobs across the company over the last four years. Northrop is one of Maryland’s larger government contract employers. If Northrop is seeing such steep losses what do you think is going to happen next, particularly with the drastic cuts in Defense scheduled to go into effect during 2013?

Basu continues with this cheery assessment:

The certainty of federal cuts to come — if not how much and where — makes it more urgent that Maryland focus on strengthening its private sector, said Basu, head of Sage Policy Group, an economic and policy consulting firm in Baltimore. He said voting to increase taxes, as the General Assembly did this year, doesn’t help the state’s reputation.

“Federal dollars are not going to drive this economy forward anymore,” Basu said. “It’s got to be private dollars.”

Of course Governor O’Malley and the Democratic leadership in the General Assembly don’t seem to understand this fundamental message. The tax and spend policies that have been in place for the last five years have been doing significant damage to the base of this economy. A lot of that damage has been glossed over by the vast amount of federal dollars that our state receives. But it’s been like a new paint job over a rotting wall; the very base of Maryland’s economy, our middle and working class families, have been ripped apart by the private sector job market that has been decimated due to higher business taxes, higher fees, and a higher cost of business due to the continued growth of an oppressive regulatory climate. Families of all stripes have suffered from their personal checkbooks thanks to higher income taxes, higher property taxes, more regulations on property and individual rights, and a higher cost for goods and services thanks to all of the aforementioned issues with the tax and regulatory climate for businesses.

But instead of doing the right thing and dealing with the problem, Martin O’Malley and the Democrats doubled-down and raised taxes again.

It’s almost scary to think what the jobs reports for June and the other out months are going to look like as cuts in federal spending deepen, and what private sector capital located in Maryland heads for the greener pastures…..